Recently, 19 Discovery Place and Charlotte Nature Museum educators completed a training program to become Certified Interpretive Guides.

By completing this program, our educators have added to their toolkit of teaching and learning approaches, specifically with respect to museum and collection-based teaching. Good teachers are always looking for the most effective ways to engage with the content and to consider how to present that content through experiences that are relevant, engaging, and meaningful.

At Discovery Place, we have a natural inner drive to learn, sometimes for personal reasons and other times for professional reasons to help us serve our public and our students better. We strive to incorporate the best approaches in formal and informal education to design the best exp… Keep reading.

Materials science is one of those areas of science that we see and interact with every day, yet we dont often stop to marvel at the elegance of the materials around us.

Strange Matter, our special limited engagement exhibition, illuminates materials science  the study of stuff  in a way that is cooler than we ever thought possible.

For example, some materials break rules that we typically accept as being unbreakable.

We commonly think of glass as being extremely fragile, so much so that when my colleagues and I introduce Museum guests to our World Alive tarantulas, we talk about how fragile the body of the arachnid is and how it would shatter like glass if we were to drop it.

But in Strange Matter, you can slam a 12 lb. bowling ball into a piece of tempered glass that … Keep reading.

Here at Discovery Place, we are obnoxiously passionate about inspiring and empowering people in all walks of life to appreciate and even love science. This passion stems not only from the geeky gene inside our DNA, it also comes from a perception that science can and has changed the world for the better.

Science is about the human desire to understand the mechanisms of the world around us. Those ambitions do not exclude the parts of our world that typically fall under the social sciences umbrella. In fact, the social context of science is an extremely important ingredient that ultimately makes or breaks the scientific endeavor. Sharing your answers with others who are also working on a problem is not only not cheating (forgive the double negative), its a critical step in the process… Keep reading.